]]>http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/tweets-from-2015-03-15-to-2015-03-21/feed/0Comics, Threats, Censorship, Free Speechhttp://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/comics-threats-censorship-free-speech/
http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/comics-threats-censorship-free-speech/#commentsFri, 20 Mar 2015 16:30:08 +0000http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/?p=13589Having written this, I don’t think it says anything new, so let’s categorize this as a summary of recent events for convenience sake, rather than a blistering think piece.

A. The Killing Joke Cover – A recent sequence of events in the comics world:

Recently, DC comics announced a bunch of variant covers celebrating the Joker, and one was released that recalled The Killing Joke, a famous if unevenly celebrated comic by Alan Moore.

Some people reacted negatively to the cover, expressing their ideas that it was too far afield from the current Batgirl comic, and that it generally promoted the wrong idea about the comic.

Some other people reacted negatively to the criticism, directing harassment and threats at the people who had criticized the cover.

DC and the artist decided to pull the cover, citing, in part, the fact that it had generated harassment and threats.

Now various misogynist assholes are crying censorship! But not about the company’s decision to remove its own artwork, but rather about the fact that protest got it removed. That protest, in their mind, is censorship.

There’s a fascinating feature on BoingBoing about “How imageboard culture shaped Gamergate.” It makes it much easier to understand how many otherwise pleasant people could adopt such an horrific behavior profile online.

But it’s crucial to think about different kinds of suppression of speech.

Censorship is, of course, when someone is kept from speaking / publishing / participating by the government.

Intimidation (in this case) is when someone is kept from speaking / publishing / participating by means of threats and harassment.

The enduring irony of #GamerGate and other prominent “defense of that thing I like” movements is that they cry censorship while perpetuating intimidation. Without irony or a sense of distance.

The proper response to speech we don’t like is more speech. Not threats, not intimidation. The marketplace of ideas needs to be won with ideas. Any other tactics are unethical, and using them degrades the value and quality of your position.

Also learned today: Kookaburras eat baby chicks. It's like finding out the kind old gent next door was a brutal strikebreaker in his youth. 12:17:00, 2015-03-14

]]>http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/tweets-from-2015-03-08-to-2015-03-14/feed/0Games: Why you should be a Cheapasshttp://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/games-why-you-should-be-a-cheapass/
http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/games-why-you-should-be-a-cheapass/#commentsFri, 13 Mar 2015 16:30:38 +0000http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/?p=13553

One of the first game companies I learned about back when I started collecting interesting games was Seattle’s own Cheapass Games, headed by James Ernest. In my collection, I have old copies of Kill Dr. Lucky, Deadwood Studios, and some kind of space game with rabbits (I have to admit, of those three, I’ve only played Kill Dr. Lucky). After several years hiatus, Ernest has resurrected the company and begun releasing his games again in a variety of ways, including Kickstarter. I’ve gotten in on a couple of these KS projects and printed a few of his print-and-play games, and a new KS arrived just last week, so I thought I’d do a survey of the Cheapass games that I have and what I think of them:

Kill Dr. Lucky is an awesome premise — it imagines what happened right before the board game Clue. Each player plays someone who hates Dr. Lucky, and spends the game trying to get in a room with him, alone, to kill him. The other players stop you by playing “luck” cards to overturn your attack. It’s fun, but a bit slow on the first few plays.

Pairs is a press-your-luck pub game reminiscent of Liar or The Great Dalmuti. The website comes with a bunch of different variants of play, so it makes for a very entertaining outing.

Get Lucky is a refined card game version of Kill Dr. Lucky, with fantastic art and funny text on each card. I like it much better than the board game version.

James Ernest’s Totally Renamed Spy Game is a game I picked up for my upcoming (unscheduled) evening of espionage. It’s a game of supervillains, in which you try to earn points by taunting spies who threaten your evil layer. The cards are very funny, and the game plays quickly.

Some Get Lucky cards:

Get Lucky cards

And our newest arrival:

Stuff and Nonsense, a repackaging of an older game Ernest designed, this is the game of fake world exploring and bluffery. The theme features the chap-hop artist Professor Elemental, and makes play pretty fun. I tried it with the family a couple times last weekend and so far, we’re liking it quite a bit.

A twenty-something hoodlum is recruited to a super-secret spy agency where he learns to fight awesomely and gets access to lots of cool gadgets and has to help stop a madman from destroying the world. As I watched Kingsman, I found myself oscillating wildly. The action set pieces are great, the film’s ethics are terrible, and the tone is really odd. Then, when the credits ran and I saw the line indicating that this film is based on a Mark Millar project, I got it. I’ve always found the ethical worldview in Millar’s comics, well, odd.

When I read Wanted and Kick-Ass, I found myself pretty ambivalent about Mark Millar’s project. Here’s what I wrote about Wanted:

Maybe I just don’t get Mark Millar’s writing style, or his interests in the superhero genre. Compare the stories at the heart of Wanted or Kick-Ass to those in The Authority, for example. Both seem concerned with the inherent dangers at the heart of the superhero idea, but where Ellis’ run on The Authority alternates between reveling in the might-makes-right attitude of its villains and the ethical ramifications of a fascist world, Millar’s Wanted seems interested only in the former.

But it’s a comic about supervillains, you say. It isn’t about heroes. Sure. And I enjoy a good villain story, viz Brian Azzarello’s Joker or various crime movies like The Godfather. But those stories explore the complexity of being a villain and the emotional dangers it brings. Wanted seems to ignore those aspects of life murdering people.

Despite the fact that the heroes in this film stand on the side of good, I still found myself at odds with the movie. In particular, two action scenes stood out in this regard. In each, the action rendered was violent, bloody, and over-the-top. The music was raucous, but neither silly nor chaotic. It was celebratory–announcing that we’re to enjoy this scene, feed our ancient blood lust and revel in the notion that might makes right. Where other films have used such scenes to engage in full comedy (Shoot ‘Em Up) or full action (The Crow), Kingsman does both, with the result of an unclear muddle.

Part of me wanted to imagine that the film intends to mock us. Like the genre-analysis built into Cabin in the Woods, it would be possible to read this film as a send-up of spy movies and making fun of the violence they include as par for the course. But if that’s the intent, something about the tone misses. Like Millar’s other stories, we’re supposed to enjoy the hero’s debaucheries, but the film doesn’t feel like it wants us to understand the nuance of them. We should enjoy them vicariously.

It was only in the tasteless humor after the world-saving battle sequence that I realized the direct similarity to Wanted as a story. Both tales involve young men whose fathers disappeared (or died) and who discover, upon growing up, that they’re due to inherit a powerful legacy. When they do inherit it, the personal perks are the best part. Indeed, the boy’s return to his mother’s abusive situation bears this out. He isn’t a man until he’s able to beat the shit out of a bunch of guys.

]]>http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/the-weird-muddled-ethics-of-kingsman/feed/0March 11, IN HISTORYhttp://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/march-11-in-history/
http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/march-11-in-history/#commentsWed, 11 Mar 2015 16:30:30 +0000http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/?p=13572This year, for the “Wednesday photos” feature, I will be including photos that reference the date of the post in their description or when they were taken.

Startup, “We Made a Mistake” – After slipping up by failing to inform one interviewee that they were being interviewed for a commerical, Startup did a whole episode exploring what happened. (12/9/2014)

TL;DR – “Quiet, Wadhwa” – After spending a whole episode (approx 20 minutes) on how a prominent male spokesperson on women in tech is resented by some women in tech, WNYC pulled the episode because the subject of the story had not been given the opportunity to comment on the story. (2/19/2015)

“Sorry (Explored)” by Joe Penniston (cc-licensed)

Other examples of mistakes and apologies from the last few years:

The Newsroom – The entire second season of the Aaron Sorkin show was about a massive error and a retracted episode of the show.

Brian Williams – Williams is on forced hiatus right now as his exaggerations about his experiences in Iraq have caught up with him.

Bill O’Reilly – After excoriating Brian Williams for his errors, O’Reilly is finding himself under fire for similar mistakes in his reporting.

It all started with Dan Rather, to my mind. Rather’s downfall over the fraudulent Killian documents occurred in the early days of web 2.0 (2004), when crowd-sourcing was possible and the news media in general was just starting to understand what a powerful fact-checking engine the mob is (many eyeballs make shallow bugs). Since then, news media have had to answer errors in ever-faster cycles, and address them more thoroughly.

But I’m interested here in the genre of the apology episode. I like to imagine that the apology episodes I’m pointing to spring from a couple factors:

First, podcasts are intimate experiences that feel more like conversations than like stage shows. A podcaster in your ear feels identical to hearing a telephone call. So when these intimate acquaintances let us down, it feels more personal. We expect a personal apology.

Second, with social media, the need for public apology rises dramatically — before social media, one angry person (like, say, the soldier who posted on Brian Williams’ Facebook Page that he didn’t remember Williams being there) now has the ability to be public immediately, and the rumor spreads at the same speed it would in a crowd, but now that crowd is the whole world.

Brian Williams’ Apology

Third, they create an honest atmosphere in which trust can be re-built. The newscaster who shies away from blame makes things worse, not better, for themselves.

I’m curious about this, and have a few questions to think about as the idea continues to evolve for me.

Are apologies of this size and frequency new? I know there are and have always been retraction columns, and occasionally stories will make big news for the story itself (the Sokal affair comes to mind), but the character of these feels different to me.

Does the heightened awareness among media consumers about how media is made help or hurt these apologies? In other words, are we more forgiving now that we’re all becoming media producer/consumers?

Is there a lower bar for newscasters (or podcasters) to regain the trust of the listeners than there was before? If media makers own their mistakes quickly and try to address them ethically (as in the episodes at the top of the page), does this make it easier for them to regain the public’s trust?

If you don’t read XKCD or Munroe’s weekly “What If?” column over at xkcd.com, you’re really missing out. This book collects some of the best What If columns, plus adds a bunch of new ones. It’s a simple premise: people ask Munroe questions like “Can dropping a steak through the atmosphere cook it by means of the re-entry burn?” or “What’s the highest a person can throw something?” or “How long could I swim in a cooling pool storing nuclear waste before I died?” And he answers the questions in very funny ways.

The best part of the book is the repeating feature “Disturbing Questions from the What If? Inbox,” in which people ask things like the best way to chop up a body or how many nuclear bombs it would take to wipe out the US. I imagine they think these are innocent questions (and they probably are) but Munroe rightly recognizes the problems with them, and pokes fun.

There’s not a lot else to say about the book. It’s great, very entertaining. And Wil Wheaton’s narration is great, though it’s pretty “Wil Wheaton-y,” so I imagine that if you didn’t like Wheaton or his performative style (as seen on, say, Tabletop), you probably wouldn’t like his narration. The other down-side to the audio book is that you don’t get to see Munroe’s great pictures, of which there are many in the physical book.

]]>http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/tweets-from-2015-03-01-to-2015-03-07/feed/0February Music rounduphttp://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/february-music-roundup-4/
http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/february-music-roundup-4/#commentsSat, 07 Mar 2015 17:30:31 +0000http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/?p=13552I review my music playlist for each month, compiled from albums that drift across my transom and tunes I download from eMusic.

Emusic albums:

Amy Correia, Lakeville – Correia has a soulful style with bluesy, sad music. Some of her songs sound like they’d work perfectly at a piano in a smoky bar. It’s a bit like Tori Amos if she cared to try the blues. “California” is particularly lonesome in a lovely way, “The Devil and I” has a good gravely blues line, “Beautiful/Ugly” is a wonderful lament for a lover. A great album.

Streetlight Manifesto, The Hands that Thieve. It’s been almost three years (can’t have been, but is!) since I bought a Streetlight Manifesto album. These guys have a solid sound, reliable but unchanging. That said, I like the new album the way I like a new James Bond movie — it’s not really going to do anything that different, but I like what it does. Again the theme of the album seems to be “we will stand by one another when bad stuff happens.” I like the title track quite a bit, and the “Oh Me, Oh My” is an amusing meditation on the end of the world. “Toe to Toe” is a nice, slightly quieter bit of songistry.

Spider John Koerner, Spider Blues – Koerner is a great bluegrass artist, with a storytelling angle and great guitar skills. His songs are bluesy and folksy. The whole album is great, so it’s hard to pick out songs I like better than others. “Baby, Don’t Come Back” is a good classic blues song; “Good Luck Child” shows off Koerner’s storytelling and harmonica skills; my favorite is “Rent Party Rag,” which helps explain how to raise money to pay your rent by having a party.

Smithsonian Folkways Classic Series Sampler – A compilation of folksy tunes. “Poor Boy a Long, Long Way from Home” by Cat Iron feels like a classic old-timey bit; Jean Ritchie’s “Most Fair Beauty Bright” is a lovely fairy tale in the storytelling style of old folk songs;

Emusic parts of albums:

Pete Seeger, a few songs – “John Hardy,” “Johnson,” and “Washer Lad” are all crushingly sad. People trapped in jail, in slavery, or ambushed by bandits. Sheesh. And then there’s the last song, a yodeler about a man who has tuberculosis, “T.B. Blues.”

Garfunkel and Oates, selected songs from Slippery When Moist. This is the album they made in time with season one of their show on IFC. “Wow” is their delightful theme song, “I Don’t Know Who You Are” is a great song about not recognizing someone who recognizes you. Then there’s “Go Kart Racing,” which is funny but definitely NSFW.

Spike Jones, selected songs. Only one month more of Spike Jones and his orchestra. It’s been quite a ride of mid-century racism and sexism and weird comedy. The cover of “It Had To Be You” is pretty great, and “Paddlin’ Maddelin Home” is a funny song about a canoe date.

Other Sources:

American Authors,Oh, What a Life- The whole album sounds like their ubiquitous and uplifting “Best Day of my Life,” pleasant light pop rock. “Trouble” is probably my favorite, but really they’re all very similar.

The recent kerfuffle about the reboot of Ghostbusters (which sounds great to me) got me thinking about reboots and, well, toys. We all remember the slip-ups. Your Battleships, your GI-Joes, your endless television cartoons created just to sell toys (He-Man and My Little Pony), but it’s worth our while to take a moment to celebrate the successful adaptations. So here are a few toys-to-movies that are definitely worth watching. (In reverse order, saving the best for last).

I’ll try to stick to movies that come from properties without a built-in storyline. So Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which comes from a comic book, will not be included because there’s a storyline to use.

Transformers
Sure, this was always going to be “Michael Bay prints money,” but the first one is a delightful popcorn blend with an amusing teenage-boy adventure storyline, fun toys, a cartoonish villain, and a teenage girl for him to lust after. If only they’d stopped. (Also, I am aware that I have violated my central premise for this, which is the idea that these are toys-made-into-movies rather than properties without any storylines to begin with, but it’s my list, so too bad.)

The LEGO movie
This could have been SOOO bad. But it’s great, a mix of humor and pop-culture references, with jokes for grown-ups and stuff kids like. And, of course, a tie-in line of LEGO toys that let you build, from instructions, the toys in the movie. EVERYTHING IS AWESOME.

Clue
The entire goddamn movie is quotable. Nearly every actor is notable and amazing. It’s funny without being awful or dated. Go watch it again right now. I’m going to.

I’ve read my fair share of old science fiction. (By old here, I generally mean things written before 1980.) I acknowledge this line is relatively arbitrary, but so am I. Some old sf gets dated pretty quickly, and feels foreign and a little weird. The Cosmic Computer comes to mind. Some old sf holds together pretty well, remaining both entertaining and illuminating its age well–The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, for instance. And then there are sf books that age badly–they don’t comment on their own era except by accident and their storytelling style stales. Just putting this out there.

Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer disappoints in far more ways than it pleases. It’s got a killer hook — what if a hyperspace-traveling planet showed up on our doorstep, closer to the moon than we are? Chaos would rule on the Earth, where tidal forces would go bonkers, earthquakes would wrack the land, and people would die in droves. The Wanderer uses multiple plots to follow the experience of people all over the Earth over the course of the first three days after the mysterious planet shows up next to ours. Awesome premise, terrible execution. I don’t know how this book won the Hugo.

A few thoughts:

As an end-of-the-world tale, The Kraken Wakes is far better, using many of the same tropes a decade earlier and doing a better job of it.

The casual misogyny famously part of the SF boys’ club is on a rampage in this book, with women being either flighty or harlots, but always being condescended to. Despite the book’s setting in the future, Leiber fails to imagine any change in cultural norms about, say, race or gender.

The cat person is amusing, but petulant and childish too. Oh, and it’s the only representative we have of the alien race. It was pretty hard to distinguish the character’s flaws from Leiber’s sense of how women act.

The people in this novel have sex at the strangest times. And often it’s in the vein of women who don’t want to have sex being convinced by an eager man.

All the casual misogyny and racism aside, the book is boring. It’s too long for the tale it tells, and several of the storylines don’t change or grow at all.

Spoiler alert: There is one aspect of this particular tale that deserves a bit more discussion — it turns out that the traveling planet is part of a huge coalition of space entities that have a set of rules about what you can and can’t do as an interstellar space faring race. The people on the Wanderer don’t like the rules, so they’re on the run from the agency. I’m not sure if Leiber was criticizing a rising nanny state idea (it feels like he was), but the society they’re running from reminds me a lot of The Culture from Iain F. Banks novels, in a good way.

Not recommended.

One more note — the cover above is the one on the edition I read. It’s very confusing, as there is no large spaceship like the one in the picture in the book. Also, the wandering planet is quite clearly described as being gold and purple, so the planet at the top isn’t even the right color. Each of these other covers fit the story better, and the ones with the cat person are particularly amusing:

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http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/the-wanderer/feed/0March 4, IN HISTORY (The Inauguration Edition)http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/march-4-in-history-the-inauguration-edition/
http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/march-4-in-history-the-inauguration-edition/#commentsWed, 04 Mar 2015 17:30:12 +0000http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/?p=13529This year, for the “Wednesday photos” feature, I will be including photos that reference the date of the post in their description or when they were taken.

What do Lincoln, Taft, and Wilson all have in common? March 4 Inauguration day!

After George Washington set the date as March 4 at his second inaugural, every President up to Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated on March 4. Hayes was sworn in on March 5th, 1877. Then we went back to the 4th until FDR’s second term, when the 20th amendment changed the inauguration day to Jan 20.

I just thought Magón’s look here was so plaintive, I had to include it too.

]]>http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/march-4-in-history-the-inauguration-edition/feed/0Dispatches from the Age of Electracy: Obsolete before it shipshttp://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/dispatches-from-the-age-of-electracy-obsolete-before-it-ships/
http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/2015/03/dispatches-from-the-age-of-electracy-obsolete-before-it-ships/#commentsTue, 03 Mar 2015 17:30:00 +0000http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/?p=13527

Rule 34

Charles Stross reflected on the relentless pace of culture and the difficulty of writing about the near future or the present in a post about his book Rule 34:

There is a certain pub in Edinburgh that I’ve used as a setting for some key scenes, because it’s quarried out of the side of a near-cliff and is notorious for having no mobile phone or wifi signal. Imagine my joy on discovering that it has acquired a strong 3G signal in the roughly two months since I checked the copy-edited manuscript. (link)

I’m watching this happen, a bit, in the context of my forthcoming book, Title Still to be Determined. My book, which should come out sometime next Spring, is a monograph about the digital age and detective fiction. At one point, I make an extended example of the anti-vaccine community as a group that flourishes through the Internet using gate-keeping and strong peer pressure to shape its conversations. This is an example I wrote a couple years ago (this book has been slow in gestation) that’s now becoming too obvious.

On the one hand, I like that people are now waking up to the dangers of our reduced herd immunity, though I wish we’d not needed the Disneyland Measles Outbreak to get the conversation started. On the other hand, I’d rather not see any examples or parts of my book become more common than they already are. Can everyone stop writing about the Internet for the next fifteen months or so? Thanks.